III
And about the time
That Milem Alkire
Became a wine seller,
And begetter of crime,
With parties on his lawn
From mid-night to dawn,
Making the wine free
Under the pine tree,
Starling Turner's wife ran away,
A woman who before was anything but gay.
Never had a lover in her life, so they say,
But like other clay, had the longing to stray.
She saw a cornet player,
An idler, a strayer,
And left her husband furious threatening to slay her,
And cursing musicians who have no honest missions.
So Starling Turner, a belated learner
Of life as music, laughter, folly,
Grew suddenly jolly, forgot his melancholy,
Became a dancer and rounded up the fiddlers,
Got up a contest of fifty old fiddlers,
With prizes for fiddling from best to middling:
A set of fine harness for the best piece of fiddling.
Work stopped, business stopped, all went mad,
Mad about music, the preachers looked sad
For music, the like of which the village never had....
The children in the street were shockingly bad,
And danced like pixies scantily clad;
Knocked away the crutches from venerable hobblers,
Threw pebbles at the windows of grocers and cobblers,
Made fun of the preachers, the grammar school teachers,
Stole spring chickens and turkey gobblers,
Roasted hooked geese in front of the police.
Till the quidnuncs decided it wasn't any use,
The devil had let a thousand devils loose.